Inspiration
One Mom’s Search for Healing
By Kay Chenevey
Inspiration
Like many of today’s health-conscious, middle-aged adults, I am careful about reducing the amount of preservatives, additives, artificial ingredients and trans fats in my diet. Yet, I am slowly poisoning myself to death.
Daily, I inject fresh toxin into my system. Not by consuming, but by complaining, whining, ranting about my teenage daughter’s latest digression.
I justify my self-poisoning as venting, a universally accepted parental practice, yet the net effect is not release, but heightened emotional turmoil. I feel like a flattened plastic grocery bag, smashed together with all the other bags in the laundry room, awaiting the next insignificant task, like collecting discarded cat litter. My soul feels dirty.
But it’s an addiction.
Like yesterday, in Target. I lost count at 28 in-and-out Zen breaths, trying to regain composure in the presence of my texting, snarling, nonsensical teenager who refused to push her own cart of binders, highlighters and tampons. If she wasn’t disappearing prematurely into the next aisle so as to not be seen with me or the cart, she was responding to the incessant invasion of text messages and phone calls. Breath #27: life is good. I am in the moment. Breath #28: life is good. I am in the moment. The anti-Buddha on my shoulder taunted, “I’ll bet the Dalai Llama never took a 17-year-old school supply shopping.”
My system, digestive and emotional – is there a difference? – was caving under this latest teenage assault. Despite my breathing efforts, my lungs and gut felt as though they were malfunctioning. The only part of my body that didn’t feel achy was my mouth. That’s because I was consciously refraining from speaking. Speaking around Molly lately, I’ve learned, is bad. This is because when I am in her presence, I can’t help myself. I become The Mom, spewing shoulds and admonitions until I sound like an unconscious replica of every female DNA strand spanning the last five generations.
I couldn’t wait to call a friend and vent once we got home. And I did. And it felt good, but only briefly. Then I felt contaminated.
I recalled, then, a brief, yet inspirational, conversation I had had earlier this week with a co-worker, Tom. The moment was so small, so subtle, that I could have easily ignored it. He had said, humorously, in response to something else I had said, “Oh, your other daughter? The 17-year-old blossoming and independent one?”
And that’s when I heard it: the sound of my own despicable voice. And then I saw it: that fleeting shadow on his face, innocent and raw.
Back at my desk, I played the justification game, a favorite first attempt when I’m feeling emotionally ugly. After all, I tempted myself, what does he know? He doesn’t even have children. Or a wife. But he’s the kind of individual who makes me want to be a better person. And so I let that little shadow linger. Inside my heart, and inside my quiet car during the commute home.
My maternal gut ached with confusion and menstrual cramps. I’m sick of feeling tormented 24-7, I thought. I’m so tired, so beaten down, so misunderstood, and afraid. And what I thought then was that Molly was too. And for the first time in two years, I thought that it was OK to be in a place where I had no answers, just a really powerful hunch. I vowed to find better words to use in public when I speak of her, not to spread the toxin. To stop poisoning myself and our relationship.
When I at last walked in the front door, I noticed that the kitchen floor was freshly mopped, Molly’s assigned chore for that day. And when I hugged her, my stubborn, fiery daughter, I held on longer than necessary. “I’m sorry,” my body’s energy said wordlessly, involuntarily. I’m sorry for being such a Mom. It’s just that I want so much for you. I want you to be happy, so I want you to have the life skills that give you a fighting chance to achieve that. I don’t know when we crossed the bridge into this Dark Land of Dissent, but I’m recognizing that we’re both strangers here. I won’t apologize for parenting, but I will for, what’s it called, not seeing. Looking at the micro instead of the macro.
Tom mentioned during our brief, philosophical conversation, that he believes all people are inherently positive. “Really?” I questioned, curious about this counterintuitive take on humanity.
“Yeah,” he replied simply. “Even when they sound and act negative, they still keep on keeping on. And that means they’re positive.”
“Oh.”
“Negative in the micro,” he summarized. “Positive in the macro. That’s my theory.”
I thought then that this outrageous motto might actually have immediate practical applications. What if I started looking at Molly in the “macro?” To really see that although she may be contentious in the micro, she is fragile and fearful in the macro. To see that she is trying on selves like she tries on clothes. To see that she wants to, must in fact, practice being grown-up in a way that’s very different from my way. For all of her daily dizziness, she is acutely aware that, in one year, she is leaving the only home she’s ever known. And it will then be her job to manage her life.
In the meantime, it’s my job to manage the big picture, and I can’t do that if I’m sabotaging my physical and parental well-being with socially-approved poison.
Kay Chenevey is a wife and working mother who found a creative outlet writing as a member of Cincinnati's Women Writing for a Change. Find out more about WWf(a)C see www.womenwriting.org
